Accountability

The Center for Effective Lawmaking seeks to understand the conditions under which constituents do (or should) care about the relative lawmaking effectiveness of their Representatives and Senators; and the accountability focus of the Center engages with these types of questions. The Cetner aspires to be a resource for informed voters; and we hope that national conversations around politics will shift from focusing largely on partisan differences across legislators to a dialogue that considers legislators’ skills and abilities in advancing their agendas.

In addition to calculating and distributing legislative effectiveness scores for each legislator in each Congress, the Center also produces legislative effectiveness scores in 19 different issue areas. We are currently working on several research projects in this space, including:

Exploring whether major laws that were sponsored by effective lawmakers have greater longevity than those advanced by other, less effective, lawmakers.

Exploring media coverage of effective lawmakers in Congress.

Studying the extent to which constituents are aware of (and care about) the lawmaking effectiveness of their representatives in the U.S. House.

An examination of how voters hold U.S. Senators accountable for their lawmaking effectiveness.

Since the Center was launched in September 2017, several media organizations and congressional campaigns have started to draw attention to legislative effectiveness scores as an example of one more consideration that should be weighed by voters.